Lifeboat Foundation

Recent work has shown that human auditory cortex contains neural populations anterior and posterior to primary auditory cortex that respond selectively to music. However, it is unknown how this selectivity for music arises. To test whether musical training is necessary, we measured fMRI responses to 192 natural sounds in 10 people with almost no musical training. When voxel responses were decomposed into underlying components, this group exhibited a music-selective component that was very similar in response profile and anatomical distribution to that previously seen in individuals with moderate musical training. We also found that musical genres that were less familiar to our participants (e.g., Balinese gamelan) produced strong responses within the music component, as did drum clips with rhythm but little melody, suggesting that these neural populations are broadly responsive to music as a whole. Our findings demonstrate that the signature properties of neural music selectivity do not require musical training to develop, showing that the music-selective neural populations are a fundamental and widespread property of the human brain.

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A multivariate genome-wide association study highlighting loci that influence both face and brain shape suggesting shared developmental axes during early embryogenesis. These loci did not overlap with those governing behavioral–cognitive traits or neuropsychiatric risk indicating divergence between early brain development and cognitive function.

Now THAT mechanism could be a game changer for functional, fully reversible cryonic suspension…

Indian jumping ants can shrink their brains by 20 per cent and then expand them back again to allow energy to be temporarily diverted towards egg production, according to a new study.

The inch-long arthropods were already known to be able to catch and kill prey twice their size, jump four inches in the air and compete in 40-day royal rumble death matches to decide the next queen of the colony.

Continue reading “Meet the insect that can shrink its brain — and then grow it back again” »

In 2003, Lyon was just finishing school and working as a hired hacker. Companies tasked him with rooting out vulnerabilities in their systems, and he’d developed mapping tools for the job. His electronic sniffers would trace a network’s lines and nodes and report back what they found. Why not set them loose on the mother of all networks, he thought? So he did.

The resulting visualization recalled grand natural patterns, like networks of neurons or the large-scale structure of the universe. But it was at once more mundane and mind-boggling—representing, as it did, both a collection of mostly standard laptop and desktop computers connected to servers in run-of-the-mill office parks and an emerging technological force that was far more than the sum of it parts.

Continue reading “This Wild Video Maps the Entire Internet and Its Evolution Since 1997” »

After a year of lockdown, many of us are finding it hard to think clearly, or remember what happened when. Neuroscientists and behavioural experts explain why.

The reality is Benny and Josh both have Canavan disease, a fatal inherited brain disorder. They are buckled into wheelchairs, don’t speak, and can’t control their limbs.

On Thursday, April 8, in Dayton, Ohio, Landsman and his family rolled the older boy, Benny, into a hospital where over several hours, neurosurgeons drilled bore holes into his skull and injected trillions of viral particles carrying the correct version of a gene his body is missing.

Controversy has shrouded the once-common plasticizer BPA since studies started to highlight its links to a whole range of adverse health effects in humans, but recent research has also shown that its substitutes mightn’t be all that safe either. A new study has investigated how these compounds impact nerve cells in the adult brain, with the authors finding that they likely permanently disrupt signal transmission, and also interfere with neural circuits involved in perception.

BPA, or bisphenol A, is a chemical that has been commonly used in food, beverage and other types of packaging for decades, but experts have grown increasingly concerned that it can leech into these consumables and impact human health in ways ranging from endocrine dysfunction to cancer. This came on the back of scientific studies revealing such links dating back to the 1990s, which in turn saw the rise of “BPA-free” plastics as a safer alternative.

One of those alternatives is bisphenol S (BPS), and while it allows plastic manufacturers to slap a BPA-free label on their packaging, more and more research is demonstrating that it mightn’t be much better for us. As just one example, a study last year showed through experiments on mice that just like BPA, BPS can alter the expression of genes in the placenta and likely fundamentally disrupt fetal brain development.

A recent study explored whether working memory training can reduce anxiety associated with a particular stressor — exam time. While working memory training did not appear to reduce test anxiety among students, perceived success during the training tasks did. The findings were published in the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement.

People who suffer from anxiety show deficits in working memory function. Working memory is a brain system that allows us to hold on to certain information and use it to guide our decisions and behavior. Scholars have found evidence to suggest that interventions that improve working memory also improve anxiety symptoms.

Little is known about how motivation might affect the success of working memory training on anxiety reduction. The authors of the new study elected to explore this topic among a sample of college students experiencing a particularly stressful season of the academic year — exam time.

Inverse spoke to Andrew Schwartz, a University of Pittsburgh neurobiologist who helped pioneer BCI technology — and he says that Neuralink seems to be bragging about things that scientists, himself included, could do decades ago.

Neuralink made a huge production out of something researchers have been able to do for decades.